📍 Where to Get Mental Health Help in Singapore: A 2026 Guide

If you're looking for this at 2am, start here: SOS is 1767, 24 hours, free. For a child, Tinkle Friend is 1800 274 4788. In an emergency, call 995.

Everything else below is the longer answer — what exists, what it costs, and how to actually get in.

Please check before you rely on any of this. Numbers, opening hours and eligibility change. Every service here is listed with enough detail to find its official page — verify there before acting on anything time-critical.

If you need help right now

You do not need to be in crisis to call a helpline. That's worth saying twice, because most people wait until things are much worse than the threshold actually requires.

For children and teenagers

Start with the school

Every MOE mainstream school has access to a school counsellor. This is the most underused resource in the country, largely because parents assume it's for serious cases or worry it will follow the child around.

It doesn't. Counselling notes are not part of the academic record, and requesting a session is as simple as emailing the form teacher or asking at the general office. It's free, it's already there, and the counsellor knows the specific pressures of that school.

If your child pushes back on the idea, we've written about how to have that conversation.

REACH

REACH (Response, Early intervention and Assessment in Community mental Health) is the national community mental health service for under-19s. It works through schools and GPs and covers assessment and short-term support. Your school counsellor or GP can make the referral.

CHAT

For ages 16–30, CHAT offers free, confidential mental health checks — a first conversation with a trained professional, without needing a diagnosis or a referral. Based at *Scape in Somerset. Call 6493 6500 or book online.

Tinkle Friend

Run by the Singapore Children's Society, Tinkle Friend (1800 274 4788) is a helpline for primary-school-age children to call themselves. Worth telling your child the number exists, even if they never use it. Children who know there is someone to call are in a different position from children who don't.

For adults

The subsidised route

This is the path most people don't know about:

1. See a polyclinic doctor or GP and say plainly that you want mental health support.
2. Ask for a referral to a public mental health service — IMH, or the psychiatry department at a public hospital.
3. The referral gets you subsidised rates. Walking into IMH without one costs considerably more.

It is slower than private care. Waiting times can run to weeks or months for non-urgent cases. But the cost difference is large enough to matter for most households.

Family Service Centres

There are Family Service Centres across the island offering free or heavily subsidised counselling, regardless of income for many services. They handle a broad range — relationship strain, parenting, financial stress, grief, mild-to-moderate mental health difficulties. Find your nearest one through the Ministry of Social and Family Development.

These are underused, and they are genuinely good.

Private therapy

Expect roughly $120–$250 per session. Some practices offer sliding-scale fees if you ask — it's not advertised, and asking is not rude.

Check that a psychologist is registered with the Singapore Register of Psychologists, or a counsellor with the Singapore Association for Counselling. There's no legal restriction on calling yourself a therapist here, so the register does real work.

Employer support

Many Singapore employers now provide an Employee Assistance Programme offering several free counselling sessions, confidentially, without HR being told who used it. Check your benefits portal. A large number of people are entitled to this and never find out.

What it costs, roughly

MediSave can be used for some psychiatric treatment. Many private insurance policies exclude mental health or apply a waiting period — check yours before assuming.

What actually happens when you call a helpline

People hesitate because they don't know what they're walking into. So, plainly:

Someone answers. They ask what's going on. You talk, or you don't, and both are fine — long silences are normal and they will wait through them.

They will not: trace your call, send an ambulance because you're upset, tell your parents or your employer, or judge how serious your problem is. They will not tell you that other people have it worse.

You don't need to be in crisis. A very large share of helpline calls are from people having a bad week who needed to say it out loud to someone with no stake in it. That is a legitimate use of the service — it is, in fact, most of what the service is for.

You can hang up whenever you want. You can call back. You can call and say "I don't know why I called."

If speaking is the barrier, SOS takes WhatsApp messages on 9151 1767. For a lot of people, typing is the difference between reaching out and not.

What to expect from a first counselling session

Also worth demystifying, because the picture most people have comes from films.

The first session is mostly practical: what brought you here, what's been happening, what you'd like to be different. You will not be made to talk about your childhood. You will not be diagnosed on the spot. It is more like an intake conversation than a therapy scene.

It usually runs 45–60 minutes, and it's normal to leave the first one feeling like nothing happened. The working part tends to start around session three.

You are allowed to not click with a counsellor, and you're allowed to say so and ask for someone else. Fit is the strongest predictor of whether therapy helps — stronger than the specific method — so this isn't rudeness, it's the thing that makes it work.

If it's your child and they refuse to go

Common, and worth planning for rather than forcing.

• Don't frame it as fixing them. "Someone to talk to who isn't us" lands better than anything implying repair.
• Offer control over the parts you can. Which day, whether you come in, whether they go alone.
• Start with the school counsellor — lower stakes, no appointment, no journey, and they can decline after one visit.
• Let them meet the person once with no commitment beyond that.
• Don't make it a condition or a punishment. Coerced therapy predicts poor outcomes fairly reliably.

If they still refuse, you can go yourself. Parent-only sessions are a normal, useful thing — you'll get concrete strategies, and changing how the adult responds shifts the household. Our guide on a child who won't talk covers the day-to-day version.

The bit nobody says out loud

Two things make people in Singapore wait longer than they should.

The first is the fear it goes on a record. For the overwhelming majority of people seeing a counsellor, a school counsellor, or a GP about stress, it does not affect employment, education or NS. The situations where mental health history is disclosed are narrow and specific. Fear of the exception keeps a lot of people from the ordinary case.

The second is the sense that it isn't bad enough yet. There's no threshold you have to cross. The Family Service Centre counsellor is not going to tell you that you've wasted their time. Going early is cheaper, faster, and works better than going late — that's true of almost everything in healthcare, and mental health is not an exception.

If it's your child and you're not sure it's serious

The usual marker is interference, not intensity. Worry that comes and goes is ordinary childhood. Worry that has stopped them sleeping, eating, going to school or seeing friends — for weeks, not days — is worth a conversation with a professional.

You are not overreacting by asking. Ask.

Our guide on helping an anxious child covers what to do at home in the meantime, and ten tools that actually help has the practical version.

We're a wellness product company in Singapore, not a clinic. We wrote this because we get asked several times a week and there was no single plain-English page to point people at. If something here is out of date, please tell us and we'll fix it.